Drowned Hopes d-7

by Donald E. Westlake

  “Come on, you,” Guffey snapped, trying to sound as gruff as some of the really bad fellas back in prison. “Talk!”

  The interloper stared over Guffey’s shoulder. “Hit him, Tom,” he said.

  “You’re trying my patience,” Guffey told him.

  “Hit him with the bottle.”

  “That’s the oldest trick in the

  THIRTY-NINE

  “Wonder which one he was,” Tom said.

  “That money stinks,” Dortmunder said.

  “No money stinks, Al,” Tom said.

  The little white car crept through the night, twin beams of light across the barren land, bouncing and bucking away from Cronley and its lone aching-headed domiciliary.

  FORTY

  When Andy Kelp walked into the OJ Bar & Grill on Amsterdam Avenue at six in the evening, the regulars were discussing the proposition that the new big buildings that had been stuck up over on Broadway, one block to the west, were actually spaceships designed and owned by aliens. “It’s for a zoo,” one regular was suggesting.

  “No no no,” a second regular said, “that isn’t what I meant.” So he was apparently the one who’d raised the suggestion in the first place. “What I meant is for the aliens to come here.”

  A third regular frowned at that. “Aliens come here? When?”

  “Now,” the second regular told him. “They’re here already.”

  The third regular looked around the joint and saw Kelp trying to attract the attention of Rollo the bartender, who was methodically rinsing seven hundred million glasses and was off in a world of his own. The regular frowned at Kelp, who frowned back. The regular returned to his friends. “I don’t see no aliens,” he said.

  “Yuppies,” the second regular told him. “Where’d you think they came from? Earth?”

  “Yuppies?” The third regular was a massive frowner. “How do you figure that?”

  “I still say,” said the first regular, “it’s for a zoo.”

  “You need a zoo,” the second regular told him. “Turn yourself in.” To the third regular he said, “It’s the yuppies, all right. Here they are all of a sudden all over the place, every one of them the same. Can actual adult human beings live indefinitely on ice cream and cookies? No. And did you ever see what they drink?”

  “Foamy stuff,” the third regular said thoughtfully. “And green stuff. And green foamy stuff.”

  “Exactly,” the second regular said. “And you notice their shoes?”

  The first regular said, dangerously, “Whadaya mean, turn myself in?”

  “Not in here,” Rollo said absently. He seemed to look at Kelp, who waved at him, but apparently Rollo’s eyes were not at the moment linked up with his brain; he went on with his glass-rinsing.

  Meanwhile, the second regular had ignored the first regular’s interruption, and was saying, “All yuppies, male and female, they all wear those same weird shoes. You know why?”

  “Fashion,” the third regular said.

  “To a zoo, you mean?” demanded the first regular. “Turn myself in at a zoo? Is that what you mean?”

  “Fashion?” echoed the second regular. “How can it be fashion to wear a suit and at the same time these big clunky weird canvas sneakers? How does it work out to be fashion for a woman to put on all kindsa makeup, and fix her hair, and put on a dress and earrings and stuff around her neck, and then put on those sneakers?”

  “So what’s your reading on this?” the third regular asked, as the first regular, zoo partisan, stepped slowly and purposefully off his stool and removed his coat.

  “Their feet are different,” the second regular explained. “On accounta they’re aliens. Human feet won’t fit into those shoes.”

  The first regular took a nineteenth-century pugilistic stance and said, “Put up your dukes.”

  “Not in here,” Rollo said calmly, still washing.

  “Rollo?” Kelp said, wagging his fingers, but Rollo still wasn’t switched to ordinary reception.

  Meantime, the other regulars were gazing upon the pugilist with surprised interest. “And what,” the second regular asked, “is this all about?”

  “You say it isn’t a zoo,” the pugilist told him, “you got me to answer to. You make cracks about me and zoos, we’ll see what happens next.”

  “Well, wait a minute,” the third regular said. “You got a zoo theory?”

  “I have,” the pugilist told him while maintaining his fists-up, wrists-bent, elbows-cocked stance, one foot in front of the other.

  “Well, let it fly,” the third regular invited him. “Everybody gets to say their theory.”

  “Naturally,” the second regular said. He’d been gazing at those upraised fists with interest but no particular concern.

  The pugilist lowered his fists minimally. “Naturally?”

  “Rollo,” said Kelp.

  “You got an idea that’s better than yuppies,” the second regular told the pugilist, “let’s have it.”

  The ex-pugilist lowered his arms. “It is yuppies,” he said. “Only it’s different.”

  The other regulars gave him all their attention.

  “Okay,” the zoo man said, looking a little self-conscious at being given the respectful hearing he’d been demanding, “the thing is this: you’re right about those new buildings being spaceships.”

  “Thank you,” the second regular said with dignity.

  “But they’re like roach motels,” the ex-pugilist said. “They attract yuppies. Little tiny rooms, loft beds, no moldings; it’s what they like. See, the aliens, they got these zoos all over the universe, all kindsa creatures, but they never had human beings before, because there weren’t any human beings that could live under zoo conditions. But yuppies do it naturally!”

  “Rollo!” insisted Kelp.

  “So, what,” asked the third regular, “is your reading of the situation?”

  “Once all the buildings are completely rented out,” the ex-pugilist told them, “they take off, like ant farms, they deliver yuppies all over the universe to all the different zoos.”

  “I don’t buy it,” the second regular said. “I still buy mine. The yuppies are the aliens. You can tell by their feet.”

  “You know, but wait a minute now,” the third regular said. “Botha these theories end at the same place. And I like the place. At the end, the new buildings and all the yuppies are both gone.”

  With a surprised look, the second regular said, “That’s true, isn’t it?”

  “Spaceship buildings,” agreed the ex-pugilist, “fulla yuppies, gone.”

  This idea was so pleasing to everyone that conversation stopped briefly so they could all contemplate this future world—soon, Lord—when the yuppies and their warrens would all be away in some other corner of the universe.

  Kelp took the opportunity of this silence to say, very loudly, “Well, Rollo, looka this! You got a customer here!”

  Rollo lifted his head at that, at last, but then he looked past Kelp toward the door, saying, “Well, if it isn’t the beer and salt.”

  “No, I’m the—” Kelp started, but was interrupted by a voice saying, “Hey, there, Andy, whadaya say?”

  Kelp turned to see Stan Murch, a stocky open-faced guy with carrot-colored hair who’d just come in. Approaching the bar, waving amiably at Rollo, Stan said, “Don’t tell me the Williamsburg Bridge is open.”

  “I wasn’t,” Kelp said.

  Rollo brought a freshly rinsed glass full of beer to Stan, took a saltshaker from the back bar, and plunked it down beside the beer, saying, “The rent is paid now, all right. The beer and salt is here.”

  Stan didn’t seem to mind this badinage, if that’s what it was. “A little salt in the beer,” he explained, “gives you the head right back, when it goes flat.”

  “Most people,” Rollo told him, “finish their beer before it goes flat. Then they have another.”

  “I’m a driver,” Stan said. “I gotta watch my intake.”

&nb
sp; “Uh-huh,” said Rollo. At long last, he looked at Kelp and said, “The other bourbon’s in back already. I gave him your glass.”

  “A nice clean glass, I bet,” Kelp said.

  “Uh-huh,” said Rollo.

  Stan picked up his beer and his salt, and he and Kelp walked together down the bar, past the regulars, who were now discussing whether the alien yuppies had come to earth for tofu or had they brought it with them. Along the way, Stan said, “The Williamsburg Bridge is a menace. The reason I’m late, I hadda come to Manhattan twice.”

  As they went back past the end of the bar and down the hall past the two doors marked with dog silhouettes labeled POINTERS and SETTERS and past the phone booth with the string dangling from the quarter slot, Kelp said, “Twice? You forget something?”

  “I forgot the Williamsburg Bridge,” Stan told him. “I came over the Manhattan Bridge—sensible, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could not get north in Manhattan,” Stan said, “not with the mess around the Williamsburg. So I went south, over the Brooklyn Bridge back to Brooklyn, took the BQE to the Midtown Tunnel, and that’s how come I’m here at all.”

  “Quick thinking,” Kelp said, and opened the green door at the end of the hall.

  “It’s what I do,” Stan said. “Drive.”

  They went through the doorway together into a small square room with a concrete floor. Beer and liquor cases stacked to the ceiling all around hid the walls, leaving only a small open space in the middle. In that space stood a battered old round table with a stained green felt top. Half a dozen chairs were placed around this table, and the only light came from one bare bulb with a round tin reflector hanging low over the table on a long black wire.

  Seated at this table were Dortmunder and Tom and Tiny, who was just saying, “Turns out he was right. His head was too wide to fit through the bars. Not all the way through.”

  “Hee-hee,” said Tom.

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Tiny said.

  Tiny and Tom considered each other. Dortmunder looked over at the doorway with the expression of a man hoping for an urgent phone call to take him away from here. “There you guys are,” he said. “You’re late.”

  “Don’t ask,” Kelp told him.

  “Williamsburg Bridge,” said Stan.

  “Well, come on in,” Dortmunder said, “and let’s get to it. Stan Murch, you know Tiny.”

  “Sure,” Stan said. “How you doin, Tiny?”

  “Keepin fit.”

  “And this,” Dortmunder said reluctantly, “is Tom Jimson. He’s the source of the job.”

  “Hiya,” Stan said.

  “The thirty-thousand-dollar driver,” Tom said, and did his chuckle noise.

  Stan looked pleasantly at Dortmunder. “Am I supposed to get that?”

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  Kelp and Stan took chairs at the table, Kelp sitting next to Dortmunder, who had in front of him two glasses—one of them sparkly clean—and a muddy bottle with a label reading AMSTERDAM LIQUOR STORE BOURBON — “OUR OWN BRAND.” Kelp took the bottle and the clean glass and poured himself a restorative.

  Meantime, Stan was saying, “So you’ve got something, huh, John? And you need a driver.”

  “This time,” Dortmunder said, “we’re gonna do it right.”

  Stan looked alert. “This time?”

  “It’s kind of an ongoing story we’ve got here,” Dortmunder told him.

  Kelp put his glass down, smacked his lips, and said to Stan, “It’s trains again.”

  “Let’s do it from the beginning, okay, Andy?” Dortmunder said.

  “Sure,” Kelp said.

  Stan sprinkled a little salt into his beer and looked around, expectant.

  FORTY-ONE

  Stan Murch and his Mom rode around Brooklyn all morning in Mom’s cab, with the off-duty light on. Having to drive this vehicle during her leisure hours, when she was already behind the wheel of the damn thing eight to ten hours a day, put Mom in a crusty mood. “I don’t see it,” she kept saying as they drove through the sunny spring day. “I don’t see the why so picky. A car is a car.”

  “Not this time,” Stan told her. “This time it’s a gift. A gift has to be something special, Mom, you know that. Hondas and Acuras he’s got. Max has an entire used-car lot of Toyotas and Datsuns. Whenever I bring him an Isuzu or a Hyundai, he nods and he looks bored and he says, ‘Put it over there.’ ”

  “He pays you, Stanley,” his Mom pointed out. “It’s a business relationship. You bring him cars in off the street, and he pays you for them. Bored and excited aren’t what it’s about.”

  “But this time,” Stan told her, “I don’t want to be paid. This time I want a favor. So this time I can’t show up with a Chevy Celebrity Eurosport or a Saab. This time I gotta attract Max’s attention.”

  His Mom looked all around to be sure there weren’t any cops in the vicinity and made an illegal right turn on red into Flatbush Avenue. “On the other hand,” she said.

  “You don’t have to run lights, Mom,” Stan told her. “We’re not in any hurry.”

  “I am,” Mom corrected him. “I’m in a hurry to get out of this car and into a tub. And you interrupted me when I was speaking.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What I was about to say,” Mom went on, “was on the other hand, you don’t want to give your friend Maximilian a car that’s so special and customized and different that the owner can recognize it so well that Max gets put in jail. That’s a gift he doesn’t need.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” Stan said, “I’ll know it when I see it.”

  “Then look at it,” Mom said, applying the brakes and pointing.

  They had just passed through Grand Army Plaza and were running along Prospect Park West, with the park on their left and the fine old stone apartment buildings on their right. Some well-to-do people live in this neighborhood, and one of them—or, more likely, a visitor to one of them—had left his dove-gray Aston Martin parked at the curb in the sunlight.

  “Well, well,” Stan said as his Mom brought the cab to a stop beside this gift. “Right you are, Mom.”

  “Make sure, Stanley.”

  So Stan got out of the cab, and the first thing he saw was that the Aston Martin was parked next to a fire hydrant. And the second thing he saw was the red, white, and blue diplomat license plate; diplomatic immunity, as the frustrated cops well know, extends also to fire hydrants.

  Stan grinned at the plate and turned back to the cab to lean in the passenger window and say, “It’s okay, Mom, it’s a diplomat. The cops won’t even write this one down.”

  “See you at Maximilian’s,” Mom said, and took off as Stan brought out his bunch of keys from his pocket and turned back to the Aston Martin.

  The fifth key did the trick, and the same key worked in the ignition. Stan swung the Aston Martin out away from the fire hydrant, made his U-turn, went back up through Grand Army Plaza, and headed east northeast across Brooklyn and Queens to Maximilian’s Used Cars, near the Nassau County line. When he got there, he took the side street beside the gaudily flagged car lot and turned in at the anonymous driveway behind it. He stopped in an area of tall scraggly weeds, flanked by the white clapboard backs of garages. Climbing out of the Aston Martin, patting it affectionately on the hood, he stepped through an unlocked gate in a chain-link fence and followed a path through more weeds and shrubbery to the rear of Maximilian’s office, a small pink stucco structure with a shabbily California look. Going through the rear door into a gray-paneled office, Stan nodded to a skinny severe hatchet-faced woman typing at one of the two nondescript desks and said, “Hi, Harriet. Where’s Max?”

  The woman went on typing, as though her hands were separate creatures with an independent existence of their own, while her head turned and she smiled and said, “Hi, Stan. Your Mom’s waiting out front. And Max is out there selling.”

  “Not to my Mom,” Stan said.

  Harriet l
aughed. “He wouldn’t even try,” she said, and went back to observing her hands type.

  Stan opened the connecting door to the outer office, stepped through, and looked out the window at the lot, filled with Colts and Golfs. Beyond them, Mom’s yellow cab sat at the curb in the sunlight. To the right was Max, over where the poorest, cheapest, most hopeless cars were kept, the cars with!!!ULTRASPECIAL!!! and!!!CREAMPUFF!!! and STEAL THIS CAR!!! written on their windshields in whitewash. Max was a big old man with heavy jowls and thin white hair who looked as though he’d been put out there in the sunlight by mistake; a windowless room with damp industrial carpet on the floor seemed more appropriate. But there he stood, glaring in the sunshine, hands on hips, dressed in his usual dark vest, hanging open over a white shirt smudged from leaning against used cars, plus shapeless shaggy black trousers and shoes like loaves of black bread.

  Max was, as Harriet had said, selling, or trying to sell, something out of his tin collection to two customers. Leaning on the windowsill, Stan observed these customers, who looked as out of place in the healthy brightness of day as Max. They were short and young, barely twenty, with thick black hair and bushy drooping mustaches and swarthy black-eyed faces. They were dressed in bulky dark sweaters and corduroy pants and rope shoes, and while one talked with Max the other kept looking out at the street. Then they’d switch, and the second would listen to Max’s line of crap for a while.

  Stan watched them dismiss a Honda hatchback without a pause, then as quickly refuse a Renault Le Car and an American Motors Hornet. They paused briefly over a Subaru station wagon, but then one of them pointed at the rear window and the other one nodded, agreeing this wasn’t their car. Max, misunderstanding, showed them a couple times how well the tailgate worked, but they weren’t interested, so at last Max shrugged and they moved on to a puke-green Chevy Impala, which sparkled both customers right up; they almost danced at the sight of it.